The issue of the “client experience” has been front-of-mind recently, for two reasons.
The first is the cover story in the December 2016 – January 2017 edition of Professional Planner, which stems from a major mystery-shopping or shadow-shopping exercise conducted by the research and consulting group CoreData.
The second is the support that Conexus Financial (the publisher of Professional Planner) has received for its annual Superannuation Fund Awards, with a record number of funds entering for recognition at an awards event next March.
The client experience can be a tricky thing to pin down. CoreData sent about 400 untrained shoppers – people with real advice needs – into the field to knock on the doors and tap onto the websites of real-life financial planning practices.
Then it collated the shoppers’ experiences and produced an overview of how the industry is going on engaging clients – and how consistent that experience is, both within advice networks and across the industry broadly.
It’s probably accurate to describe the findings as mixed. Some networks are delivering great, consistent client experiences. Some networks have some practices that do a great job, and some that don’t. And some networks are struggling.
Consistency of experience is important, because how well financial planning businesses deal with new clients will have a significant bearing on how successfully it will increase the generally cited figure of two in 10 Australians who use a financial planner.
You start to get an idea of why that figure has apparently been so difficult to budge when you read the comments of Sean Allen, CoreData’s director of Australian financial services (pictured).
If a potential client phones a financial planner and the call is not returned, or an online inquiry goes unanswered, or the client has an appointment scheduled for when that business is closed (yes, really), or they do get an appointment but the planner then fails to follow them up – and if those things happen often enough – then it surely must have an effect on how many new clients the industry can recruit, and ultimately on that 20 per cent penetration figure.
The experiences of superannuation fund members have been in the spotlight too. In March next year Conexus will announce the winners of its superannuation awards which, in addition to being independent, are designed to recognise the funds that produce the best member experience, measured across a range of different aspects of the funds’ operations.
Ultimately, of course, a super fund member cares most about how much income they’ll receive in retirement; but there are many things a fund can do to help along the way, including, for example (but far from only), facilitating access to the right advice, at the right time in the member’s life.
At the end of the day the consumer is the most important person in everything the financial services industry does.
